What’s Phishing? Simply put it’s the process of stealing someones user details for any number of reasons, one being to sell it on the undernet, the cyber black market. How is Phishing done, how can you protect yourself from being victim, who practices these techniques and in hell can they actually be used for good?

It’s a well known fact that Phishing is not just ‘evil’, it’s very much ‘illegal’ and can land you in jail, if not that then very very poor. But why talk about phishing on a Blackhat SEO related forum? Recently I heard rumors that Phishing was being used by SEOs and I would like to put an end to this bullshit, once and for all. People who use phishing to gain access onto web servers, and then use that to drop their own sites links, or tamper with the site (possibly a competitors site) in an attempt to slump them down in the rankings by m,alisiously screwing up with their on site SEO, these people are not to be mistaken for any sort of SEO. They are online criminals, not even hackers, and they should be caught and put behind bars. Simple as that. BlackHat has never been about stealing, it’s about Optimizing your site, coming up with smart techniques to rank YOUR site and not harm others to do so.

Anyway, there are several phishing techniques used, only one of which I’ll go into detail in discussing, one that is most commonly used. Hardcore phishers attack vulnerable servers, gain access and revert login details and forms to their own so that data entered is sent to them. Tricky phishers disguise a site as an authority site and lure users into believing it’s the real deal. Take a look at how domain names are used to aid in the phishing process for more information.

So how is a site setup to aid in phishing? Very simple, a copy of an actual site is taken, programs such as httrack and others help in extracting all the target websites folders and subdirectories in working order to be ready for upload on a new domain to function fine there. From there on a phisher simply plays with the forms, login fields and such so that any data entered will be sent to the phisher, smart phishers will redirect a user off their phishing site, to a second harmless URL and then from there bounce them off another redirect to the original sites login page or form so that a user does not get suspicious. Usually they are redirected to an original sites login form error page so that the user assumes that the data he/she had entered was wrong, they enter it again and get access into the real site. Confused? Read it again slowly, or just comment with a question.

We would love for nothing more than to setup a few working/dummy examples to help you spot some of these phishing sites, but until sites such as myspace, yahoo and paypal reply to our emails, we’ll have to make do with explaining this in text. <smirk>

So it’s not that complicated, just about anyone with a little html skills can setup a phishing site, trick is to spread the phishing sites link and not raise alarms, people use emails, like the recent paypal phishing scheme where supposedly an email from somethingoranother@yahoo.com is sent to you asking you to click the link www.paypal.com and fill out security info, funny thing is hovering over the link shows www.paypal.com which as explained on out domain blog, can be easily faked, but even clicking on this url, takes you to a site, paypal? Even in the address bar, it simply reads paypal.com and all the links seem normal, that too is explained in our domain blog under the topic Phishing with Domains. Check it out and let us know what you think, and hopefully soon we’ll have a few running examples to help aid you in protecting yourselves from these phishers.